These quotes make you think George Orwell had a time machine and saw the future. "The existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions." "You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself." "We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it." "We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." "A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud." "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever." "Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing." "In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act." "Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution, one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship." "The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history." "Looking at the whole world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery." "He is a slave with a semblance of liberty which is worse than the most cruel slavery." "In every one of those little stucco boxes, there’s some poor bastard who’s never free except when he”s fast asleep and dreaming" "There is something wrong with a regime that requires a pyramid of corpses every few years." "Threats to freedom of speech, writing, and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect, and unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen." "The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits “atrocities” but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future." What’s your first thought after reading?